AP - The Senate, in a direct challenge to President Bush, voted Tuesday to temporarily halt the shipment of thousands of barrels of oil a day into the government's emergency reserve. Both Democrats and Republicans said such shipments make no sense when oil is costing more than $120 a barrel and could better be used to add supplies to a tight market and possibly lower prices.

AP - John Hagee, an influential Texas televangelist who endorsed John McCain, apologized to Catholics Tuesday for his stinging criticism of the Roman Catholic Church and for having "emphasized the darkest chapters in the history of Catholic and Protestant relations with the Jews."

AP - One of the most important Dead Sea scrolls is going on display in Jerusalem this week — more than four decades after it was last seen by the public. The 24-foot scroll with the text of the Bible's Book of Isaiah had been in a dark, temperature-controlled room at the Israel Museum since 1967. It went on display two years earlier, but curators replaced it with a facsimile after noticing new cracks in the calfskin parchment.

Reuters - The death toll in China's earthquake climbed past 13,000 on Tuesday and looked set to rise much higher after media said some 19,000 people were buried in rubble in just one area.

Reuters - An agreement aimed at ending fighting in the Baghdad bastion of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr appeared on the verge of collapse on Tuesday after gunmen attacked U.S. troops.

Reuters - Lebanon's Sunni Muslim leader Saad al-Hariri pledged on Tuesday there would be no political surrender to what he called a bid by Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian backers to impose their will on the nation by force.

Reuters - Heavy rains pelted homeless cyclone survivors in Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta on Tuesday, complicating the already slow delivery of aid to more than 1.5 million people facing hunger and disease.

AFP - China's biggest earthquake for a generation left tens of thousands dead, missing or buried under the rubble of broken communities Tuesday, unleashing a desperate nationwide relief effort.

AP - Former Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh disclosed no new rules violations in the Spygate scandal during his meeting with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell or in the tapes that the league released Tuesday.

AP - The toll of the dead and missing soared as rescue workers dug through flattened schools and homes on Tuesday in a desperate attempt to find survivors of China's worst earthquake in three decades.